When I was a sophomore in high school, from 1987 to 1988, my friend Paul and I had Commodore C64 computers. There was a new graphical user interface called GEOS that had transformed the way we interacted with our computers. We used the C64 to play games but also write papers for school.One day Paul called me. He was clearly troubled. He had somehow...

  In the fall of 1998 I joined the AFCERT. I became acquainted with the amazing book TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols by W. Richard Stevens. About a year later I exchanged emails with Mr. Stevens. Here is the last exchange, as forwarded from my AFCERT email address to my home email.From "Capt Richard Bejtlich - Real Time Chief" Mon Sep  6...

This is unusual. I found this "skills and interest radar" diagram I created in July 2005. It looks like my attempt to capture and prioritize technical interests. At the time I was about to start consulting on my own, IIRC.Copyright 2003-2020 Richard Bejtlich and TaoSecurity (taosecurity.blogspot.com and www.taosecurity.com)

  I wrote this on 7 December 2018 but never published it until today. The following are the "key network questions" which "would answer many key questions about [a] network, without having to access a third party log repository. This data is derived from mining Zeek log data as it is created, rather than storing and querying Zeek logs in a third party...

Cybersecurity is a social and policy problem, not a scientific or technical problem. Cybersecurity is also a wicked problem. In a landmark 1973 article, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, urban planners Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber described wicked problems in these terms:“The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of...

I want to make a note of the numbers of words and pages in my core security writings.The Tao of Network Security Monitoring / 236k words / 833 pagesExtrusion Detection / 113k words / 417 pagesThe Practice of Network Security Monitoring / 97k words / 380 pagesThe Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol 1 / 84k words / 357 pagesThe Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Vol...